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First Contact

Adapted from ‘The George at Cley’ by Dun.can from Flickr under Creative Commons.

A glamorous, terrifying whirl of light, lushness and noise — that’s my earliest memory of The Pub.

I was about seven or eight and on a family holiday in Cley next the Sea, Norfolk. We usually stayed in slightly scary bed-and-breakfasts (out by ten and don’t come back until tea time) but that year, for some reason, we were in the George Hotel. My memories are of gorgeously deep red carpets and a baronial fireplace whose scale and richness are probably being exaggerated in the data recall process.

The moment I recall most vividly, the instance when my crush on The Pub was formed, is from after dark. I’d been put to bed and told to stay there with a warning: under no circumstances was I to come down to the public bar. But I needed something, in the way only small children can need something, and so I had to go down to where I could hear everyone laughing and having fun without me.

I was awed by the experience. Everything was sparkling and everyone was aglow, including my parents, surrounded by friends and gently, sociably tipsy, in the midst of a crowd of merry strangers.

The illusion was shattered when they spotted me and, in a half-panic, bundled me back upstairs with a telling off, but it was too late.

I’d seen where adults went to play, and I liked it, and thirty years on, I still do.

One reply on “First Contact”

I’ve stayed in that exact hotel! (though they put us up in the euphemistically titled “stables flats” outside. Were/are your parents birdwatchers too?

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